Counterinsurgency for Readers at Home: Chilling Encounters with Guerrillas in Post-Napoleonic Novels

The irregular fighters or guerrilleros who sprung up across Spain in its war of independence against Napoleon in the early nineteenth century made a strong impression on international audiences. Military theorists like Clausewitz discussed the implications of irregular tactics for the wars of the future, liberal propaganda lauded the protagonists of a ‘people’s war’, and the concept of the ‘guerrilla’ as a patriotic, politically motivated freedom fighter was born. Yet as this positive concept was being constructed, a flurry of literary narratives arrived to contradict it. Novelists conjured up fictional encounter stories in which guerrillas were at best transgressive and at worst demonic, portraying irregulars as the real enemy to hate and fear, regardless of whether they had been military allies in practice. Guerrilla tactics were denounced as unmistakably ‘other’, as immoral and too costly to the suffering civilian population. This chapter examines several early-nineteenth-century stories of violent guerrilla encounters set in the Peninsular War to demonstrate how this ‘othering’ was achieved in literature, revealing the common tropes and underlying contradictions within these narratives. It demonstrates how the irregular fighter has been marginalised over time through such narratives of difference, particularly those which pose guerrillas as barbaric and criminal versus the supposedly civilised and disciplined armed forces.